I Do Solemnly Swear.......

The fact is I haven't quite done what I wanted this year in the weight loss department, which, after all, is why we are gathered together in the Boot Camp, m'Lords and Ladies.

Year end, and I'm still a couple of pounds off my halfway point. While it's somewhat more than quite likely that'll be gone in the next few days, this is still enough to make me grouchy on Old Year's Morn.

Don't know about you but I'm going into this latest and best New Year hardcore committed on the diet front, and it's head back down, horns locked and doing till I'm done. Damn it, this thing's been going on too long already (since late July), and I'm not halfway yet??? OK. there was (and is still) an unconscionable amount still to lose. What's gone is a frighteningly huge sackful of lard, which is good, but consider the rest of it and not even halfway yet...

But, hey, I'm not going to get rid of this by sitting on my arse endlessly writing a self-obsessed blog while failing to learn the daily the lesson of the scales, am I? Thinking about all matters germane, I should have arranged to postpone this year's Saturnalia until I was good and ready (i.e. when my total weight loss target had been met, murdered and given the full fathom five and I was holding my slender perfect self together exquisitely in ongoing and permanent yo-yo-free maintenance. Soon come, next year.).

For reasons I can't quite piece together, we had intended going to pay homage to the entirely inappropriate the New Year's Day breakfast buffet at Dog Central, aka The (excellent) Blue Bird Cafe at Ferring. The pictures on the site don't do justice to the gigantic platefuls they pile up on special occasions like this, it really is The Full English writ large (when I went looking for that last link, I laughed like a drain when I inadvertently encountered this little gem instead. Do please click to encounter a prime collection of genuine 100% sad English tossers!).

That BIG big breakfast really would have been getting off on the wrong foot and might have sent an entirely wrong message to all those bright new mornings eagerly waiting up ahead, but my wife just suggested that we drop by the Blue Bird as arranged, but that we just have a coffee. My relief was total: I'd been wondering how to get out of that one.... But if you need a recipe, this one's OK, except the author (appropriately named Pratt!) overlooked the very necessary baked beans, and where she refers to 'one egg', that should be two. The 'very necessary baked beans', by the way, is one of the few things I would ever endorse that's made by Heinz. Baked beans have to be made by Heinz: no others are acceptable. I have to point out that Albert Roux thinks so, too: here's the proof (just above halfway down the page). He's been consistent in this view, having published it back in 1994 in his neat little book Cher Albert, where he let's us in on his 3-Michelin Star secret: add a bloody big knob of butter in with the beans as you're warming them through. Magnifique. He's not wrong.

My grouchiness this morning, however, is just me being pissed off with me for not having magicked more of me away yet, and I shouldn't spill any of this copious bile in your esteemed direction. Instead I've a particularly groucho-ey and completely wonderful New Year's present for you, bringing together two of my life-long hero role models: where else would you see Groucho Marx and Lord Buckley together? Don't say I never gives you nothin' and a Happy New Year to youse too!

Look, if I'm honest, what really soured my milk today and opened the door for my grumpiness to spill forth was an email received from my so-called self-styled friend Jack Rebaldi who's opening the latest production of Cats in Hamburg in the next couple of days. Jack plays the male lead Munkustrap, has done for years, West End, across Europe, slated for the first production in space, probably (the bottom two pictures on this link page show Jack all pussied-up). Anyway, this person, whom I've known (and even trusted after a fashion) for years and who does this for a living (so you know he just has to be a really fit bastard to start with), has the effrontery to send me this: '...have just arrived in Hamburg for my first previews, having rehearsed in Dusseldorf until now. By the way, I’ve lost four stones since September!' Only he didn't even bother to put it in bold.

Do you get the total, insolent insouciance of it? 'By the way....'!!!!! 56lbs gone, mentioned en passant and fiddledeedee (really rubbing my fat nose in it! That Rebaldi knows how to hurt). 56lbs? Just from doing a bit of singing and dancing about. Not like he was having to WORK at it, like we have to, and certainly not like he had it to lose in the first place. Bastard. Even gets interviewed on TV about it, not the 56lbs thing in particular, more the Cats thing in general, but still. Break a leg, Jack (and not your bloody arm like when you were doing Dance Of The Vampires in Berlin, eh?).

So now you know why I'm out of sorts. Nothing is so galling as other people's success, especially when it's a matter of dumping the excess avoir du pois.

Anyways, it's time to link hands, do the Old Lang Syne number and pledge not just a cup of kindness to the world but also to ourselves as individuals. Because until we start appreciating our own worth, we're not going to get the lid nailed down on this big fat issue.

Q: Do we each of us seriously want to break out of this stupid cycle of over-indulgence fuelled by addiction, and throw that excess luggage off our individual psychic trailers which makes gives us the licence to behave so very badly.

A: Yes.

So having agreed that, which wasn't too difficult, let's move on. Except, hang on, Fred. It wasn't too difficult to agree. It's the moving on which is the tricky bit.

Coming to terms with this problem, which is so deep-rooted in our individual personalities is not going to be easy. It will demand everything of each one of us. These demons won't give up without an almighty struggle. Just don't expect any sympathy from me when you fall. You'll get understanding by the bucket-load, but not sympathy. For one, I've got my own demons to kill, and, two, you've just got to get back on that horse and ride this addiction down.

The one thing I know, and just take it from me if you're in doubt: it will get easier with time. And you can help make it easier for yourself, by turning away from those foods that help keep you in chains. I don't just rail at the processed food industry because, by and large (Heinz baked beans being an exception!) their stuff tastes worse than the alternatives you can make for yourself. I attack them because they are attacking us, every day, with their toxic, poisonous products.

Extreme? Over the top? Out of proportion? Guilty as charged. But so are they. I get you to eat a chunk of cyanide. You die. Simples! That's the way with your genuine poison. But the fact that some poisons work much slower doesn't stop them from being poisons. Nor does the fact that they poson you, but don't actually kill you; least, not directly. You eat something which is not entirely conducive to health and you're ingesting a poison: the label is appropriate, it's just a matter of degree. And, by the way, toxins can and do accumulate over time, so at least think about sorting it.

Example: yesterday I was in correspondence with one of the readers of this blog who had just bought her first ever globe of garlic! She had no idea what to do with it. That's OK, she does now, and I guarantee she'll buy no more of the crappy, nasty 'garlic powder' she's used up to now. A small victory, yes, but it's a first step on a long road, and I'm delighted she's taken it:it makes the second step easier!

So, my resolution: to get back into my full diet, to re-establish a solid but not excessive ketosis, to watch those pounds disappear, to eat well but with moderation, to stay off the booze, to increase my exercise (though probably not to the extent required to appear in bloody Cats, I grant you), and to reclaim my health - permanently.

Can you sign up to this too?

Look if I can do it, Eating With Consciousness and adhering to the principles of SDCM - self-discipline, control and moderation - I'm bloody sure you can. Here's the proof: I started off back in July at 397lbs. That's evidence of how far away I was from those simple but demanding disciplines. How heavy were you at your worst? Less than me? As I said, if I can do it, starting where I did, SO CAN YOU!

I'm not some stoked, pumped jargon-spewing motivation-meister in a pair of red budgie smugglers rippling his muscles for the cameras hyping you up vacuously. I'm a lazy old fat bastard who decided he'd had enough of where his life was going (an early, and inevitable grave, by the way), and decided to get it sorted.

If you want to give yourself a new start, now really is the time. Now ALWAYS is the time. Just commit and do it!

There's a resolution - not for New Year, but for life!

Finally, let us depart this old year with a gloriously surreal moment or two from What's My Line, January 27th 1957, when dinosaurs still walked the earth and the rock was giving way to the roll. And always remember that 2010 was the year that Keith Richards let us mere mortals in on the big secret: rocking is the easy part.

Till the next year, fired up, focussed, and definitely determined,

Your old pal,

Fred